Finding Oscar

On behalf of the United Fruit Company, whose board members and senior leaders permeated the U.S. Government, the Eisenhower Administration, led by John Foster and Allen Dulles, orchestrated a coup in Guatemala overthrowing democratically-elected President Jacabo Arbenz. His crime? He demanded fair treatment from a multi-national behemoth which owned most of Guatemala’s land and exploited its hold on a sovereign nation for profit at the expense of its people. This was more than enough evidence for the Dulles brothers to label him communist; a death sentence back in the 1950s.

25 years after the coup, and with Guatemala still enduring a brutal civil war incited by the events from the ‘50s, it was President Reagan’s turn to warn of the menace of what would happen to the peace-loving U.S. should the Evil Empire usurp power in Guatemala. Perhaps this is why those of us around in 2017 can only shrug to explain why the U.S. Government looked the other way when the Guatemalan military invaded a town of 300 people called Dos Erres and executed every single last villager, from infant to grandmother, by throwing them down a well, mostly while still alive.

Finding Oscar is most effective at whipping up the audience’s moral outrage when some of the actual perpetrators of the massacre stare directly into the camera and explain in precise detail who threw the first baby down the well, and then describe who was raped, and then how they explained to a little girl she was walking toward a vaccination instead of her execution. I was familiar with Guatemala’s recent history headed in to Finding Oscar, an asset for comprehending the bigger picture, but I had never heard of the Dos Erres massacre; in fact, other than the local population, a young Guatemalan prosecutor, and a handful of State Department employees, nobody knew, or didn't want to know, about the evils of what happened that day in December 1982.

Writer/director Ryan Suffern and co-writer Mark Monroe did their homework and dug up the Embassy cables written soon after rumor and innuendo of the massacre spread. Suffern artfully displays these formerly classified documents and removes the black bars which covered up the redacted intelligence as the narrator stoically reads aloud about the disappearance of an entire village. Perhaps everyone was kidnapped, maybe they just picked up and left in the dead of night, or maybe they were methodically slaughtered and dumped down a well. Nobody went to check.

The intimate and specific details of how the military threw little children who were still alive into the bottom of a well is nauseating. Maps are drawn and some of the men who were there take us through the timeline. It is surreal. However, Finding Oscar loses its momentum and incredulousness when it jumps to present day and turns into investigative mode. Two little boys were taken from Dos Erres that night. Nobody knows why, but two perpetrators selected the boys, took them home to their various families, and raised them as their own sons.

Ramiro Cristales was five; he remembers that night. Granted asylum by Canada, his story is the far more intriguing of the two; however, and to Finding Oscar’s detriment, Suffern opted to follow the search for Oscar Ramírez, four at the time, and who does not remember that night at all. Oscar’s story was mostly told by NPR’s This American Life a few years ago. Now, with the search for Oscar lacking suspense and taking away from the event that launched the search, Finding Oscar tumbles a tier into merely interesting territory, rather than a sure spot in that category where all your friends implore you to see that new must-see documentary with a story so shocking you will never forget it.

What could have been. While the movie poster screams someone named Steven Spielberg executive produced the film, it was the director’s choices which will ultimately temper the arthouse crowd’s enthusiasm for this project. Footage of garbage bags full of bones and skulls, rotted clothing, and dismembered toys will imprint their ghastly images into your memory, but the impact this story could have landed if handled just a bit differently may leave you yearning for much more afterward. Guatemala’s civil war is over and its reconciliation program has all the room in the world for improvement, but at least Finding Oscar brought global attention to an atrocity which never should have been overlooked in the first place.